Once upon a time, in a land about twelve hours north of here, I was in the second year of grad school and really regretting all my life choices. Because the professor of the sociolinguistics class I was taking was a post-doc living several states away from her fellow-academic husband, she felt the same and gave our class completely free rein in picking our final paper topic. Since watching Firefly was the only thing that had given me joy that semester, I decided to examine the pidginization of Chinese and English in that universe.